BNP Paribas said Microsoft (MSFT) has extended its diversification from OpenAI (OPENAI) through its partnership with Anthropic (ANTHRO).
On Tuesday, Microsoft (MSFT) and Nvidia (NVDA) announced a partnership with Anthropic, including investments by the two in the Claude chatbot maker. Under the deal, Nvidia and Microsoft are committing to invest up to $10B and up to $5B, respectively, in Anthropic. Anthropic also said it has committed to spend $30B on Microsoft’s Azure compute capacity and to contract additional compute capacity up to one gigawatt.
“In our view, Anthropic’s new Microsoft partnership should be broadly positive as it reinforces Microsoft’s positioning as a key AI cloud provider at a time when major AI labs are increasingly diversifying their compute relationships. While it’s unclear when the contract officially commences, we estimate the Anthropic commitment could represent $10bn of annual revenue (assuming 1 GW = $10bn of GPU rental revenue) or a ~10% uplift to our FY27 Azure estimate if we assume the contract is fully ramped by FY27,” said analyst Stefan Slowinski.
However, Slowinski noted that in the current market backdrop, even strategically important partnerships continue to be met with muted market receptions as concerns remain whether AI labs can ultimately finance these long-dated commitments.
The analyst added that while investors may have stopped rewarding incremental compute agreements, he continues to believe that both OpenAI and Anthropic have credible paths in meeting their obligations. Both companies remain adamant that access to compute serves as a key unlock in scaling revenue, in turn enabling these companies to pursue future capital raises.
Slowinski said that it has been reported that OpenAI is targeting at least $200B in revenues by 2030. While ambitious, the company continues to diversify its product and services offerings beyond just ChatGPT and OpenAI enterprise, creating more monetization opportunities as more compute comes online, the analyst added.
Slowinski noted that these products and services are likely to include adding advertising and commerce capabilities to ChatGPT for its nearly 1 billion users, launching its Sora 2 video app, continuing to drive API revenues and making its models available for agent use and application development, and even entering the market for Cloud computing services itself.
On the enterprise front, OpenAI now has 1 million business customers as it scales beyond consumer usage. OpenAI’s $100M deal with Intuit is another example of how OpenAI is monetizing ChatGPT enterprise, while also taking over as the user interface for long-established application providers, Slowinski added.